I'm kind of late checking in here, but I was sure that I would find an entry from DN re first leg of journey. Hmmm. Maybe tomorrow morning, since she was so extraordinarily tired.

I was up too late last night and swore I would go to bed right after Numbers tonight--HA! No such luck. Nami didn't come in until after 12:00. Last night AB and I tangled and we were really mad at each other, so she didn't sleep with me, but at some point Nami did, sort of. I told R this morning that Nami doesn't have very good bed manners and she asked me what that meant: only a non-cat person has to ask! I was dragging today...

Worked for Rachel for 4 hours.

Made a semi-decent dinner.

Picked up phone battery...it is charging now!

Cleaned cat-water thingey.

Got AB's meds down her in her morning wet food; evening pill in pill pocket put in with 2 greenies and dry food. (She threw up quite extravagantly yesterday after eating lots of her cousins' food.) Managing her diet and meds could be a full time job...

BD present came from HI from PF: ginger marmalade and tangerine marmalade, fancy honey, choc/macademia shortbread, macademia nuts, and a darling turtle mug. Fun present.

I found a good paper-sorter at Target today: maybe it will help me keep my papers from getting out of hand.

F. and I went to see Tish tonight in Monterey at a wonderful, intimate venue, Monterey Live!, which is in one of the old adobes on Alvarado downtown. It seats about 100, w/ tables here and there, a bar (in another room), cafe fare, and discreet , respectful wait staffing during the music.

It's too late, I have to go to bed and finish this tomorrow and hope I don't forget too much of what I want to say...

This was in the WSJ, so it shouldn't come as a surprise, but I have to vent anyway...:

HEALTH COSTS
Bigger Burden for Women
By LAURIE MCGINLEY
May 6, 2007

Next Sunday, we celebrate mothers' devotion to their families' health and welfare. But are moms themselves getting the care they need? No, says a recent report that found women struggle more with health costs than do men, and sometimes forgo needed care for financial reasons.

"Women need more care and get less care, and run up more medical debt," says Judith Waxman, a vice president at the National Women's Law Center in Washington, and co-author of the Commonwealth Fund report.

Part of the reason women need more health care is "just biology," Ms. Waxman says, as women's reproductive systems need regular checkups. In addition, the study found women more likely than men to use prescription drugs on a regular basis, and twice as likely to have mental-health problems such as depression and anxiety.

At the same time, women have a harder time paying for care, according to the study. Women have lower incomes than men, higher out-of-pocket medical costs and less access to employer-provided health insurance because many don't work full time. The report said the result was that almost 38% of women struggle with health bills, compared to 29% of men.

In addition, about 33% of insured women and 68% of uninsured women don't get the health care they need, the report said, because they can't afford it. That compares with 23% of insured men and 49% of uninsured men.

Putting Others First

Ms. Waxman also speculates that women, determined to take care of their families, end up denying themselves needed health care if there's not enough time and money for everything. "It's hard to get to a specialist, both in terms of time and money," she says. "And women put their kids first."

So what can women do to hold down health costs and get the care they need?

On insurance, Ms. Waxman urges women to press employers, where possible, for comprehensive coverage with low deductibles. That runs counter to the current trend at some companies to steer employees toward health savings accounts, which link savings accounts for routine medical costs with high-deductible policies.

ki:With our predominantly part-time jobs, and lower-paying positions, and overall less clout, we are urged to get the male bosses to buck the trend for us. Yeah, right. Good Luck.

Hit by High Deductibles

Recently, Harvard Medical School researchers concluded that high-deductible policies unfairly burden women because the median expense in such plans was less than $500 for men under 45 but more than $1,200 for women, largely due to mammograms, Pap tests, birth control and other reproductive-health expenses.

But Grace-Marie Turner, president of the Galen Institute, an Alexandria, Va., think tank that promotes free-market health reform, criticizes the analysis as "overly narrow." She notes that high-deductible plans tend to have lower premiums than traditional policies, allowing women to use the savings for routine expenses. She also says that many high-deductible plans cover mammograms and other preventive services.

ki:How many women do you know who have part-time jobs who have health insurance? I know women who work full time who can't afford bare-bones catastrophic coverage, and I am talking about our great middle class. If the problem, as stated in this article, is TIME AND MONEY, what woman will have ANY plan, let alone one w/ a high deductible and 'savings' to use for routine expenses? And, for the rare woman in that category, the article establishes that she will spend her time and money on her kids.

Women can best hold down their health costs by taking aggressive steps to prevent illness and getting screening tests, says Gloria Sarto, a professor of medicine and public health at the University of Wisconsin. "Regular exercise -- even if it's just walking three times a week -- is very, very important," she says.


ki:Again, time and money, and even women who do all the proscribed activities, screenings, etc., STILL get cancer, heart attacks, need major and/or minor surgery; they need health care, just like everyone else. Sick and healthy, rich and poor, and everyone in between.

She recommends that women keep an eye out for local "health fairs" where they can get tested at relatively low costs for blood pressure, cholesterol levels and bone density.

ki:See previous comment.

Women also should embrace generic drugs, says Gail Shearer, director of Consumer Reports Best Buy Drugs, a free public-education campaign on medications (www.crbestbuydrugs.org). For example, generic hormone treatments for menopausal symptoms can save women hundreds of dollars a year versus the brand-name medicines, she says. Lovastatin, a generic anticholesterol drug, costs $32 a month -- compared with $133 a month for Lipitor, Pfizer's best-selling cholesterol drug.


.

ki:Great article, right???!!! Really gets to the heart of the problem and offers some good solutions. I felt SO MUCH BETTER after I read this. The men and pseudo-men who read the WSJ , not to mention the writers and publishers, really have this situation in hand. I can pass this on to my friend and she will be so relieved. (I read the WSJ Sunday in the Santa Cruz Sentinel, my local paper, to get a sense of what is disseminated to us masses re national business and what they think we should do w/ our $--that we don't have :-} ...)

I'm sure that if, for some reason our leaders had to purchase their own insurance, they would be willing to do all these things in order to have that regular prostate exam. After all, it's easy. And almost free. Heck, if you believe Montel, all you have to do is make a phone call, and your meds are free. What they don't tell you on TV is that you'd better not have any assets other than your car or your house, or you won't qualify, and the drug companies are under no obligation to continue the program of 'patient assistance.' And patient is what you will have to be, because each company has different rules and paperwork, different schedules for renewal, different drugs each will provide.... or not.

In the meantime, you are going into your fourteenth diabetic coma, or depressive episode, or you're on a manic spending spree if you are bi-polar, because YOU DON'T HAVE YOUR MEDS. And to get them you have to work the system: your internist, your psychiatrist, whoever might have samples....until the patient assistance delivers, if it does. And working the system takes time and energy and presence of mind, which some sick people just do not always have.

Excuse me, I have to go take my walk now, so I can stay healthy and won't need insurance anyway, and I'm walking over to Long's, where I can check my own blood pressure, then I'll come home and look it up on the computer and try to figure out if it's OK. When I get back, I'll check the mail for my FREE generic cholesterol-lowering drug, and if it's not there I'll call the FREE  Tuesday night Rotary clinic and ask  them, No, I'll have to leave a message, if they have any samples to tide me over. Then I'll see if I can trade shifts with Brenda Sue so I can go to the clinic, because I have to get there 2 hours early to be sure that I will see a doctor. They are only there once a week. I hope that Lee Jr.'s bronchitis is gone, so that I can have a turn this time.

 I am tackling the mess in my living room, with my dear niece's help (she has company coming next week and for some reason wants a place to put the futon for guest to sleep). There is a cafeteria-type table covered w/ fabric stacks that migrated from the adjacent studio--yes, I am lucky enough to have a studio--when I started to re-org it in JANUARY, and I am still in the process. On other tables and the floor, in baskets, in stacks, are books, papers(precious and oh so collectible), bags of linens (also collectable--can't decide which way to spell that word--) and other treasures inherited from my packrat aunt who died last November, and did I mention books?

Also boxes of fabric I have culled from my stash to sell, tho' I have never done that before, plus fabric to donate to the quilt guild annual flea market and/or kids'/charity quilt-making groups (we have 2). And containers and did I mention baskets? of clipped comic strips (I have a special fondness for Danae of Non Sequitar...and Zits), bon mots and peculiarly trenchant horoscopes. And my DN won't let me slide by just stacking the aforementioned containers: NO. She is going through EVERYTHING. and she is throwing some things away w/o even asking me, though she does have a pretty good sense of what to put in a stack for me to check. And we have had 2 other deaths in the family, so there are lots of pictures, too, framed and otherwise, and other stuff: things no one else wanted, that I took because I couldn't bear to see it go...

Some of the time she is reading things and lol, like at what my DM wrote in my baby book (I had my own languaget), and a strange record system our tres anal grand/great grandfather kept of, among other things, his weight over time, his net worth, scientific names of whales, definitions of certain words, a note that each grandchild had taken his/her $1000 inheritance prior to grandparents'death, qualities of kinds of cheeses. Such lovely memories of him....

I am actually throwing away AKA recycling most of the cards I had saved and magazines are going to the flea mkt. or to the dr.'s ofc. I am being my version of ruthless, which some would say is rather benign...

ALL THIS so that I can get BACK IN THE STUDIO and finish culling fabric, rearrange the deck chairs on the Tit....no, I mean rearrange/reorganize the studio to accommodate my laptop and get back to sewing. These are my projects:

1. ONE-QUILT BLOCK COAT FOR DECEMBER 2007 EXHIBIT

2. Decide and make or choose something to enter in local Art League fiber arts show, deadline 5/18

3. make baby blanket for neighbor--baby due in about 1 week

4. make PINK tee to wear in Race for the Cure on 5/12.

5. about 5 alterations jobs for ma and pa

6. 2 alterations due by 6/2 for barter partner who helped w/ original studio re-org. (May trade this off w/ friend I am editing grad. school papers for in one week when she is done and can sew.)

7. camp shirt, pieced, for DSIL, using rems from shirt made for DB for BD to be celebrated sometime in May. DM now clumping family BDs and choosing how to celebrate w/o really consulting honorees...it's so fun.

8. make first Sewing With a Plan (SWAP) with summer clothes I have to fill in gaps.

Should I go for ten and freak myself out completely???

9. C's caftan.

10. DM's caftan.

There. Did it. I think that's enough!!!!

Well, if anyone is still reading, thank you. I'd sew up an award for you, but, as you can see, I'm rather busy at the moment!

I plan to be in the studio by Wed., because that is when the houseguest arrives.



On Friday I worked w/ a friend who doesn't DO muslins: what a nightmare! We did a tissue fit; now I remember why I hate them. And it wasn't even a tissue fit w/ a copy of the pattern made on exam. table paper, as I always do, but with the original, so when we cut the tissue and made changes, no original to compare w/. Aaaarrrggghhhhh!!!

I'm going to be working as the 'consultant' in a sewing lounge/salon-type situation; this made me question my creds for doing it...Quick and easy is a myth!

I'm cold; I should go to bed; Mina knocked some pottery off a shelf she shouldn't have been able to reach; it landed in the water dish; water splashed out on the floor and into the dry food dish. Mina then lapped water from the dish and ate some soggy food. And shook water off her paws. The pottery didn't break--whew--but I moved the boxes so that the access isn't so easy. I don't want to be responsible for any breakage, even if my cat is not the perp... Nami quietly watched all this from the bed. Not the best start for taking care of my niece's 2 cats while she is away for a week.

I found a new-to-me pattern site w/ European children's clothing: very whimsical designs and fabric combinations. Just what I don't need. Lots of flounces, ruffles, flares, pockets, twirly skirts: just the kind of clothes that little girls love! The samples and photos are fab. The designers give the individual seamstress the right to make and sell single garments made from the patterns with proper credit to them. Very generous.

I'm frustrated because I spent most of the evening trying to set up a budget online and finally gave up because it was so slow. Maddening! I missed dinner because I was so obsessed.

Think I'll have some toast and go to bed.